Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Penny Arcade Nails Second Life's New Sign-Up Page Avatars

Penny Arcade's latest strip is on Second Life, or more precisely, Second Life's new user sign-up/avatar selection page. To say more is to give the joke away, but if you're not a hardcore gamer, you should know that Penny Arcade is easily the most-read and influential comic strip among devotees of PC and console games, and the passionate sub-culture that's sprung from them. (Long ago, in an attempt to attract gamers to SL, Linden Lab advertised on Penny Arcade, mostly to little avail.)

Given its influence, all this means the Penny Arcade strip will pretty much frame how gamers will see SL's new user sign-up page. Which is to say:

ya know as much as people try to downplay the whole fetish thing in sl it may be one of a few things that is keeping the whole SL world afloat.
Let’s be honest we have whole regions classed as adult, which is also the most expensive land. I don’t think they have created all this land for my personal interests and shopping habits alone. I don’t find myself standing alone in a sex sim to often.
I love how SL ers get indignant about the fetish aspect of the game when really at some point SL should except that the whole sex fetish thing is a viable, money making, interest attracting, part of the game.
Sure there are many other wonderful things to do in SL which attract revenue, but sex/fetish is an equal part as well. I don’t know the answer or claim to. I just think pretending like it is some kind of small sick nitch group with only 2 or 3 members when we have whole regions dedicated to the subject, is both immature, stoopid and self defeating for the game.

Well at least they pulled the vampires and fairies off the Secondlife home page and now picture more sensical human avatars. Maybe SL can get back to attracting new users other than gamers and teens. Of which don't help the virtual economy much.

As a solution provider trying to support and promote practical use of the platform for education, training, health support networks, science, music industry, etc., it gives us hope that Linden Lab does care about its existing customers. My team was just about to throw in the towel after five years (and a quarter of a million dollars later in tier). The fairies and vampires on the homepage had denied us the ability to get anyone to take our projects seriously.

What would be even better, is in the avatar selection page, offer normal humans first, before a bunny, robot, airship, or goth (another teen attractant). I shudder every time I try to bring in real life friends and colleagues, hoping that the bunny avatar won't make them lose interest with signing up.

Average gamers and teens don't have money to go on shopping sprees and buy or rent land. Many just go around begging for Lindens getting banned from areas. Average adults that have interests other than realms, fairies, and vampires, often have real money to blow on virtual products and land. And one would think that average adults would be the demographic to target for sustainability of Secondlife.

/me sighs.
Not only does this indeed support that image of SL that almost scared me off, it also shows the confusion new avatar choices can create.
We should just have normal (realistic scaled) human avatars to begin with.
It has happened several times that I get some airship avatar visiting our sim, 1 day old, I tell them about our rules and that they have to change.
Useless because the new viewers make it so that IM's are often not that obvious, people don't spot them.
So the ejecting starts.
Sometimes they do get the IM and tell me they choose the airship for fun, not expecting it to be their avatar they would be stuck with.
And then I can explain someone who's 1 day old with a different viewer how to create a human avatar...

PA is obviously making fun of not what the new avatars represent, but of what people from outside already bring to them as an assumption about the avatars.

And this:http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/03/23
A strip from 2 entries prior...
Demonstrates that PA is really about taking something and finding the funny misconception in it.
People won't come away from that thinking Star Wars was really an early gay-pron flick... they'll just laugh at at the PA characters running with the gag on certain conservative groups...

Pussycat Catnap, creativity has nothing to do with it...
We just have more interest in realism then the whole fantasy scene.
History is exciting enough as it is.

If people join, become realistic humans, they soon find out they can change into something different and will find a way.
If people join and see these unusual avatars, it may scare them off.

Like Cindy Bolero said, if I help friends join up in SL and they see the robot and the airship and the vampire, they think they are joining a kids game.
And if, for fun, they decide to be something unusual, it is a lot of trouble for new people to undo this.
Changing your avatar can be quite a hassle.
Enough to scare someone off for ever.

What I would like to see, what might work rather well, is the possibility to create an avatar BEFORE going into SL.
We have seen this in many games, such as The Sims.
Before anything happens, before you go anywhere, you can already have lots of fun to create your avatar.
Head, skin, face, etc.
It does not have to be as detailed as the avatar creation inworld (but it could!) and on its own it would be a fun thing to do on a website.
Create an avatar on the SL website!
It will also help you learn how to change it later.
And then, you could add a few unrealistic options as well.
Here you go, this is your avatar, do you want to be a man or a woman?
You choose and see a basic avatar, then you see a few buttons that let you change sex again, but also choose an animal, furry, robot, whatever.

I don't mind the options being there.
I just don't like the way they are offered now.

As for griefing at infohubs, the only way to combat that is to either give every new person a private area in SL to start out.
Although.... perhaps this could be something good for a browser based viewer thingy...
After all, you won't need that much power to run a simple empty field where you get to test out your abilities as an avatar.
Maybe this too is something that could be done outside of Second Life.
All alone, you have time to learn how to move, watch a few videos with instructions, etc.
Then you can use search to find a nice sim to go to and then, only then, do you start up your real SL viewer to enter the real SL.
And you get teleported to the sim you choose.
No more infohubs full of annoying people, but straight to the sim you want to explore first.

What's with the anthropocentrism? All my avis are human (most of the time), but variety is the spice of life... and variety is a HUGE net positive for Second Life vs. the other virtual worlds that offer nothing but vanilla human avatars.

If it scares a few people off, well, did we really need more intolerants?

I'd like to believe that, Pussycat, but... in the SW strip, there is a character there pointing out that the fellow is going off the deep end. In the SL strip, there's no contrary view; the sole character present spouts, and hence the strip's author is arguably pandering to, the stereotype that Second Life is all perverts--a stereotype not just prevalent in the mainstream media but also at least present in tech media (e.g. Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo).

Saying that an anthropomorphic airship would only not be welcome in a sim lacking creativity is an incredibly ignorant and indeed rather offensive assertion, Pussycat.

There are countless RP sims with elaborate settings that have developed and expanded through *years and years* of collaborative creativity where certain "characters" -- like an an anthropomorphic airship -- would not be welcome simply because it would break the carefully established setting and environment.

That has nothing to do with a lack of creativity or diversity, as many of those sims are themselves sci-fi, high fantasy, and the like. It's simply about maintaining the integrity of a setting.

1) you folks running your RP sims certainly have the right to request people be dressed in period costumes and look the part of the activity. A roman simulation will not be a good place for the monster truck AV, for instance. At the same time though, you guys need an entry point where the rules for the rest of the sim are spelled out so folks don't have to intrude when they simply TP in. The noobs looking for stuff to do don't know that they are ruining other people's fun by walking into the Berlin sim wearing a furry avatar.

You want to have RPing fun in specific avatars. I've no issue with that. The problem is that you don't take measures to keep out those who aren't in your RP group. So 2) is, make everything but the entry portal spot Group Only with banlines. Only folks who understand that they have to be in period garb while inside the sim will be asked to join said group and be permitted to enter further than the welcome area. Tada, problem solved.

But don't beat up the noobs for failing to magically know that your sim is for fairies only (or whatever). There are better ways of keeping out the nonRPers from group lands while giving newcomers a chance to learn what your RPing sim is about. If you won't bother to restrict your land to your group and create an entry portal to explain what's required to enter that land, then you will always be intruded upon.